Calendars and uses thereof are many and vary widely. By calendar is meant any medium carrying a plurality of past, present, or future day indications. The day indications can be spelled out with alphabetical characters and/or made up of numeric characters. One type of popular calendar in use today is a day oriented ring binder having a separate page or sheet of paper for each day. Each page has imprinted thereon a date and two pages are dedicated to each date. A monthly calendar related to the date is imprinted on one of the pages. The pages occur consecutively in the binder according to date. Blank space is provided a user for preparing or writing in event notes related to the page date. The event notes can be information related to a meeting, conference, appointment, etc. The notes can be narrative, abbreviated, etc. The user can be the owner of the calendar as well as a visual reviewer of the calendar.
Another type of popular calendar has a month or portion thereof depicted on each page in grid form. This type of calendar has day blocks containing day numbers. Blank space surrounds the numbers in the blocks and is used by a user for entering event notes. The extensiveness of the notes which can be entered is directly related to the size of the blocks, user writing, etc. For a heavily scheduled user such as someone having different meetings every hour or so each day, providing sufficient space for meaningful notes would require a calendar of unwieldly size. A more manageable alternative is reversion to the previously described day oriented ring binder. Underlying major problems still exists, though. One is the excessive time required to leaf back and forth through the pages in search of a desired date for entering a note. Another is clutter. As the number of notes grows, the time required to read and decipher the notes increases.
With the advent of application driven keyboard/display work stations, the door was opened for application programmers to create a so-called electronic calendars. The most pertinent known work of others includes the creation of a monthly calendar grid similar to that described above and having embedded note abbreviations for timed day events. This annotated calendar is created from both month and day screens. That is, based on a clock, day blocks on the monthly calendar grid screen are filled in with appropriate day numbers on one line in each of the blocks. Then, based on keying and creating filled in day screens, abbreviations are filled in on another line in the blocks. No narrative information is provided for on the calendar screen. As is the case in certain instances, there is a need to obtain meaningful detail related to an abbreviation. This requires recall of a day screen. An example is an important reminder non-correlatible to the abbreviation, such as a note to bring materials to a meeting in conference room F. The fact of a meeting is provided for with an abbreviation such as "M". However, the reminder is not provided for and recall is in order.
Another problem with the above-mentioned prior work of others is that excessive day screen keying is required to handle abbreviations. That is, abbreviations have to be keyed in on the day screen. This requires time and thought. Yet another problem with the prior work of others is that the positional relationship to time of the abbreviation is not readily discernible. That is, a user can not always accurately correlate a meeting time with the location of the abbreviation in the day block.
In addition to the above, with the advent of application driven keyboard/display work stations, document footnoting become more readily manageable. That is, correlating footnotes and pages such that the footnotes appear on the same page with a corresponding footnote references is now a system operation. Drawing any analogy between document footnoting and the instant invention requires that the body text for a page of a footnoted document be equivalent to a monthly calendar grid. The two are not equivalent, though. Calendar day oriented footnotes must change on a daily basis in relation to a relatively fixed monthly calendar. As such, the footnoting of documents, taken alone or in combination with work of others, is not considered to either anticipate the instant invention or render the instant invention obvious.
The invention of this application presents advances over known art or work of others in that the flexibility in the use and creation of day screens is improved, and day screen event related information in narrative form is available as a footnote upon combined screen creation. The advantages of these advances are that screen size does not have to be increased, more meaningful information can be presented to a user, and information is readily available in uncluttered form.